The HAVEN system combines patients’ vital signs - such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature - with their blood test results, comorbidities and frailty into a single risk score. The HAVEN score gives a more precise indication of which patients are deteriorating when compared with previously published scores. Over the past 20 years, health care systems worldwide have implemented alerting systems to improve detection of patients at risk of deterioration. Most are based on abnormalities in patients’ vital signs, usually by combining them into an early warning score. Despite the widespread introduction of early warning score systems, which are based on vital signs, deterioration still goes unrecognised,' Prof Watkinson explained.
